De-cluttering, Japanese style

It is almost end of the year, and I am pretty sure that one of the many things occupying your mind now is how to tidy up things in your home — your closet, particularly — and deal with hoards of anything and everything.

“If certain items no longer spark joy, then discard them.” This is the simplest, most basic advice you can get on how to refresh your home and, by some stretch, your life. Said piece of guidance is the main thesis of Marie Kondo’s bestselling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of De-cluttering and Organizing. It teaches you how to arrange your home in such a way that you are surrounded by only the things you truly have affection for. She has the amazing skill of making cleaning sound thrilling.

Kondo, a 30-year-old “cleaning consultant,” has taken the subject of de-cluttering seriously   and made it totally fresh with her practical suggestions and style.

The book is not just for homemakers but also for the growing number of househusbands and heads of single homes that live in a world inundated with all sorts of tips and solutions. It guides you on how to organize or store things, and deal with your accumulated possessions.  Kondo shuns the clutter of tips and solutions, believing that the usual storage “solutions” are really just prisons within which to bury possessions that “spark no joy.” She posits that if you rely on such solutions, you will continually go back to your old ways and the cluttered state that requires so much work and constant worry. If you continue to tidy bit by bit every day, that means, “You’ll be tidying forever.”

Kondo’s system centers on “tidying everything, all at once,” in a way that you’ll never have to do it again. She splits the system into two functions: discarding and organizing. She pushes for discarding by category, putting all items together and cataloging them, one by one. At the end you’ll perhaps have a small portion of the belongings you started with. The organizing part of her system calls for a designation of a place for each of your things and restricting storage to one place.

Kondo’s system allows you to set free items you have kept just for the sake of keeping them. It also provides you a level of comfort after letting go of things that no longer make you happy. Kondo cites two reasons why you can’t let something go: attachment to the past or a fear for the future:

There are many tips in Kondo’s helpful book and here are some key takeaways for your consideration:

Tidy up by category. Deal with every single one of your items at once. Otherwise they’ll continue to creep from room to room, and you’ll never rein in the clutter. De-clutter in the following order: Clothing, books, papers, miscellaneous items and mementos, which include photos.

Classify papers into three categories: papers currently in use, papers that need to be kept for a limited period, and those that need to be kept indefinitely. Papers that do not fall into one of these categories can be disposed of. Sentimental items that happen to be made of paper — wedding invitations, love letters — should be classified as mementos and organized within that category.

Your clothes would be “happier” folded in a dresser. You can adopt a vertical fold technique, which can be applied to everything from T-shirts to undergarments. You can make a long rectangle, and from the bottom up fold the item into a little package. Kondo’s vertical folding method makes everything easy to spot, since you aren’t messing up an entire heap every time you take something out or put something back. Folded this way, clothing looks like fabric origami, ready to line your drawers in neat rows.

Make good use of shoeboxes, or any pretty box you have tucked away. It possesses an all-purpose organizing power.

During the purging process, don’t focus on what to flush out, but on what you want to keep. In this manner you will take the time to cherish the things that you love.

Don’t show your family what you have purged since they’ll want to stop you from getting rid of so much.

Nostalgia is not your friend.

Designate a storage place for all items.

Find suitable containers to hold small, loose items.

Consistently return items to their assigned homes.

Chrissy Halton says, “Clutter is anything that doesn’t belong in a space — whether it belongs elsewhere in your home or it doesn’t belong in your home any longer.” This New Year, consider cleaning up and experience what Albert Einstein talks about: “Out of clutter, find simplicity.”

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